Posted by echollama 6/28/2025
> What might actually work
This section is idealistic. I guess the author was too damaged by his own experience to actually study the wave of twitter replacements. I would love to see an analysis of those. "Different Funding Methods" is clearly required but perhaps not sufficient.
Cheap hits to increase pleasure centers in the brain that overall have a detrimental cost to humanity with entire industries to deal with the health consequences.
This is the mining of wealth from health reducing the overall productivity of humanity for the sake of near term profits. Optimizing short term gains for long term progress.
As someone who's a lifelong Muslim and even more dedicated to that in my late 30s and now at 40 I'll say we were put on this earth for a purpose. As engineers we need to understand our own design. We need to understand that all the things we constructed for ourselves isn't all for our benefit but actually a lot of it is harmful, whether it be the digital life or processed food. This is a more holistic way to live. The author obviously wanted to get people offline. I think the issue is when the algorithm of silicon valley is making money then anything inherently social becomes about addiction and gamification. There are alternative routes forward but probably by first getting offline or reassessing ones relationship with the world..
The point is that these are not tools, they provide a direct kick, which is a goal in itself. Whisky is not a tool.
As an immigrant to the US, I found dessert in US contains much more sugar than where I was. And when I make/recommend less sugary food, friends don't like it even though some of them admitted that's healthier.
so similar to diabetes, I would expect Ozempic for algorithm feed addiction will be available one day to solve this, or at least sounds like so (although I'm not fully convinced).
It may sounds dystopia, but addiction is a builtin feature of late stage capitalism, and it's already too late to turn around.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/28/opinion/private-equity.ht...
> To get funding, you need users. To get more funding, you need exponential growth. Growth becomes the primary metric
No, you don't. This exponential user scaling theory of investment is a sickness that has taken over silicon valley and is half the reason for much of the harm we are seeing. Serve a small number users really well, build all the infra to autoscale and let the organic growth happen more slowly. Get to a bigger critical mass and you'll eventually be able to take money on your own terms. If you can't do that, you haven't waited long enough, tried hard enough, or maybe your idea just isn't what you thought it was.
> We don’t all have ADHD. We have an addiction. Growing up, I barely knew a world without social media, and neither did my friends. We were the guinea pigs for Silicon Valley's great dopamine experiment, and now we’re waking up with the side effects.
Saying it's a "dopamine experiment" is just as bad an incorrect as calling your monitor "the cpu" or saying "I'm so adhd" to describe a common behavior.
Using the concept of addiction and completely unrelated neurochemistry in this context drags in all the terribly dangerous ideas of drug addiction. Drugs are entirely different things that truly do subvert incentive salience at the neurochemical level. While screens and speakers most certainly do not. And even if they did it's be "glutamergic experiment" not "dopamine". These ideas imply that in normal situations and stimuli humans do not have volition and so need state force to protect them from their own choices. This premise is far more damaging to society than screens and sounds could ever be.
Very clear causation. Very clearly outside of human volition.
Now you have screens and sounds. Very clearly not effecting incentive salience directly. Very clearly not effecting glutamergic agonism (in the shell of the nucleus accumbens) directly. The only mechanism of action would be through the person actually finding the experience enjoyable repeatedly and learning to anticipate this real enjoyment. Just normal human experience. No more 'addictive' and damaging to ones life than the random interval operant conditioning of recreational fishing, and probably much less expensive.
Very abstract causation with a very weak effect. Very clearly not ouside of human volition.
And, btw, gambling disorder was grandfathered in (there are no non-substance addictions in the DSM or ICD as your article highlights at the start). Repeated calls for, and instantiations of, working groups in the DSM and ICD have covered these 'media addictions' and found the medical support wanting over and over the last 20 years. Much like uncategorizable gambling disorder would be rejected if considered these days with modern medical standards and understandings. Most of the support for these concepts come from commercial groups that profit off "treatments". It's very similar to the "gay conversion camps" model in terms of political advocacy without scientific support. But the memes for "dopamine screens" and the like have raged like wildfire among the uninformed which gives such evil for-profit groups a seeming gleen of legitimacy they definitely do not have.
If it was not clear from me addresing the points of the linked paper above, I did read the Philosophical Transactions B paper (a very low tier journal for any biology subject). In this review paper they collect a random assortment of other studies to try to say gambling disorder people's brains are similar to drug addicted people. If you've read it (then I don't know why you linked it) but you'd know they come away with no solid conclusions beyond one: gambling disorder people often have drug problems too. This does not support your argument in this context.
I recommend you check out some of the lay review articles coming out of Kent Berridge's lab: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/berridge-lab/publications/